FIRE!

A Tale of the Marvel Universe

by DarkMark

Part 9

The facts in the case of Gary Gilbert were these:

Born in New Rochelle, New York, 1946, shortly after his father, Simon Gilbert, got back from the War. His mother, Carrie, bore him and no other. Simon got into college on the G.I. Bill, got out with a degree in engineering and another one in business administration, and went to work for Howard Stark some years before the old man passed on and passed the business to his son Tony. The family was Republican. Simon expected his son to be the same.

He was not.

Gary grew up in wealth, privilege, and the shadow of the New Frontier. His father never cared that much for JFK, even after the assassination. But what his father could not accept even more than that, was Change.

America, Gary had come to realize, had been in a state of extreme stability during his lifetime, such as could be maintained. The War had been won, the Cold War had been maintained with varying degrees of success, and the country was unbelievably prosperous, the envy of the entire planet.

But with all that, there was injustice, and inequality. That inequality wore many different faces, but the one most prominent was black. As long as the double standard existed between whites and everyone else, Gary knew that the gap between the America he had loved, the one about which he had been taught in school, and the reality would still be palpable.

In May of 1964, Gary Gilbert graduated high school and went to college, at Empire State University. Like his old man, he intended to be an engineer, though the elder Gilbert was by now a ranking executive at Stark Industries. The country was still bleeding through the open hole that had been shot in Jack Kennedy. Lyndon Johnson was forging ahead with his War on Poverty, with his speech that ended in "We shall overcome", and with his hopes to educate as many as possible. The New Deal, phase two.

Unfortunately, after some shots were fired at a PT boat in Vietnam, he forged ahead with plans in that area, too.

By the time Gary started his fall semester, students were being drafted and sent to the war.

At first, he was pro-hawk. After all, it was the Commies we were fighting, the ones who had put up the Berlin Wall and crushed resistance in Eastern Europe and taken over China and caused the Cuban Crisis and brainwashed Cardinal Mindsentsky. So, yeah, Gary didn't have too much problem with fighting the Commies, at first.

But there were other currents on campus in that wonderful year of 1964. Most of the ones who seemed smart enough to think politically were pro-King, pro-black liberation, even, sometimes, pro-Malcolm. (That, even though one black student that Gary had befriended said Malcolm changed so often these days he didn't know where the man was so he could be pro him, or against him.) There were others, of Gary's father's stripe, who opposed them. Gary and his friends mostly shut them out.

Among Gary's friends was one who, flatly, opposed the Vietnam war. His name was David Graine. Before long, he'd gotten the nickname "Against the Graine", for obvious reasons. He was pre-law, fairly brilliant, and so far left he called the Democrats fascists. He was the first to write a four-letter word in front of Johnson's name on a bit of public graffiti, though nobody could prove that it was him.

"They used to call it the New Frontier," he said, in a campus bull session one time. "But what kind of frontier is it? It's just another damned rehash of the other one. They just improved the guns. Bang, there goes Jack Kennedy. Bang, there goes Medgar Evers. Bang, there goes Malcolm X. And we know how many bangs there are in Asia every day."

"Hey, man, who do you wanna bang?" said Sammy Martin, a second-year transfer from upstate. A couple of guys laughed, but it didn't last for long. Graine saw to that.

"I want to bang Johnson," he said. "I want to bang Rockefeller, and Ford, and DuPont, and the whole damn power structure. I want to bust this thing wide open. I want to see what we're not getting to see, and make it to where nobody ever gets us into a war again."

"Don't you think the North had anything to do with it?" asked Rich McGowan, another dormer working on his pre-law degree.

"The North is just doing what the North has always done," Graine answered. "We didn't have to get involved in it. We didn't get involved with Hungary, or Yugoslavia. Why do we have to get involved in Johnson's damn trophy war? Why do we have to be the whores for the power elite?"

That was a long time before people were regularly tossing around phrases like "power elite". But Gary never forgot where he'd heard it first.

There was more debate, or more properly, argument, after that. Then they crashed, and got up for class, and went through the motions. Gary Gilbert wasn't entirely persuaded, by a long shot, of Graine's validity.

But he did begin to question. In particular, he questioned his privilege.

It didn't come all at once. Just bit by bit, slowly. Why was America proclaimed as such a great nation, a shining city on a hill, and yet allowed its blacks to suffer in ghettos, its Indians to be isolated on reservations, its women to be treated as inferior to their husbands or men in general, and anyone it felt like bombing to be treated as its victims? There was quite a bit of opposition to that last, especially when dissenters pointed out what the Communists were doing in North Vietnam.

Still, Gary Gilbert began to wonder.

He had talks with his father about it, at times. Why were the blacks, until recently, denied the vote? Well, son, we can't go around feeling guilty for everything our ancestors did wrong, can we? Especially when they did so much right. Those were the ones who won from Valley Forge to Berlin to Tokyo, and maybe to Korea as well. They were the ones who gave you this great country to live in, and the life-style you're living.

Well, wasn't there enough of that life-style to go around for nonwhites?

There will be, son, in the future, if we keep things together here and make sure there's jobs to give them by keeping up the corporate structure. Say, who have you been talking to up there, anyway?

Before long, Graine had told him about a protest march. They needed people to carry signs. Hell, they needed just about anybody they could rally out there. So what about it? Was he ready to stop talking, and start walking? After all, it was going to be nonviolent. Just march, and let the Man know what you thought.

Gary said, "I'll go," out of curiosity more than anything else. So he went.

The protest signs didn't carry any obscenities. That was too early in the Movement for that. Gary felt a bit out of place—no, a lot out of place—among the bearded, carefully straggly types who made up the bulk of the protestors. Couldn't have been more than 25 of them out there, carrying those pickets. A crazy Coxey's Army, Gary thought to himself. But he held the sign, and he looked full into the face of the Man, with his blue uniforms, crash helmets, and billy clubs, as he marched.

And he got a faceful of Mace for his looking.

It burned like hell and made him scream, made him drop his sign, fall to his knees, fall flat on the ground and scratch at his face, trying to remove it so the burning could go away. There were others in the group, screaming, and members of the crowd screaming at them, screaming things that would never make the news shows that covered this, and the Man coming and hauling people off by the armpits, sometimes bashing a person over the head if he resisted, but there weren't too many who resisted, their faces were burning and that was the important thing, oh god oh god oh god this stuff HURTS...

...and the next thing Gary knew, he was getting his face washed in a sink at police headquarters.

They wanted to send him home with a warning, since his parents were rich. But he asked what the rest were getting. They told him, "A night in the slammer."

So he said, "That's where I want to be, too."

And they let him.

Within four hours, Simon Gilbert and his wife, Carrie, were at the jail, together with their lawyer. They insisted on getting Gary out. Gary resisted, and his mates in the large cell with him applauded. Simon grimaced and said, "The hell with that. Get him out of there." So a couple of guards came in, pulled Gary out of the cell, and slammed the door behind him.

"What did you do that for?" asked Gary, defiantly.

"Shut up, son," snapped Simon, and walked before him with his wife as the guards accompanied them down the hall.

After the appropriate papers were signed, Gary was extruded from the jail in the custody of his parents. His father fumed, but saved most of it until they were home. When they were, he let loose on his son, and it led to a shouting match. That led to him running out the door. Carrie Gilbert called for him to come back, knowing it was about as much good as trying to turn the wind.

By morning, he was back at the college which he attended, wondering if he'd actually jumped bail. The ones who hadn't gone to the demonstration clustered around with questions for him, since he was just about the first one back. "We did our part," he said. "We stood up. The Man tear-gassed us. How about you?"

A lot of them didn't care to answer that question.

By afternoon, Gary's calculus instructor asked him to step into the hall. He thought about breaking and running, but there was little you could escape to in a third-floor classroom with but one door to the outside. Two cops were waiting for him, and he surrendered.

It turned out he had been guilty of bail-jumping by leaving town. Gary got a suspended sentence and much lecturing by the judge, and cost his parents a bundle to avoid spending at least thirty days in the lockup.

To Gary, it didn't matter. He'd found out what he wanted to do with his life. He had a cause. He had friends. Better than that, he had allies.

For every "Sure, dad," he gave out by rote, the thought grew stronger in his mind: the Left was the only way to go.

The next several months went okay. Simon Gilbert, encouraged, brought his son to a company dinner at which Iron Man spoke in place of Mr. Stark, who was otherwise engaged. Simon could tell his son was impressed by the hero's armor, and enjoyed the demonstration of his repulsors (he punched a hole through a steel plate on a rack thirty feet across the room) and his strength (he lifted an entire table that ten attendees were sitting on). But the kid's attention seemed to wane during Iron Man's speech. Nonetheless, he shook hands with the Avenger when they were in line, and had a few questions about his armor. Penetrating questions.

Simon didn't know whether to be impressed by his son's interest, or not.

There were other protests at Empire State as the four-year term dragged on. Simon Gilbert was sure he saw his son at several of them, in the film clips on the news at night. He angrily asked his Gary if he was involved in them. Gary said no.

The detective that Simon hired later on that year to tail him said something different.

Gary was, according to him, heavily involved with the Movement. Groups like the Students for a Democratic Society were barely getting off the ground, and the Weathermen were still a ways away. But he had attended meetings, he had formed alliances, he had contributed what money he had, and, yes, he had taken part in demonstrations, the kind that were increasingly turning violent as the months went on. He was confirmed to have used drugs, albeit little more than marijuana. In those heady days, that was almost a relief.

Except to Simon Gilbert, who pulled his son out of ESU the day after he got the report.

There was much screaming and many accusations on both sides. Carrie Gilbert tried in vain to calm the waters, tried in vain to reach her son, and finally took the Caddy and left both her son and husband for a long stay in her parents' home and another at her best friend's. The divorce papers came through not long afterward.

Gary was kept under virtual house arrest by his father, who was damned if he was going to see any son of his grow up to be a Communist.

After awhile, Gary came to his father with a proposal. If he'd let him continue his education by taking tech and industrial courses provided by Stark Industries, then he'd say bye-bye to radicalism. Simon asked him if he really meant that. Gary said he did. Simon didn't know whether to believe him or not. But Carrie was lost to him now. He wanted to believe, needed to believe, that there was still part of his family which was responsive to him now. Part of the family that was still truly his.

So he agreed.

Gary bent himself to his studies, and excelled. Particularly in the areas of robotics, cybernetics, and design. Who would have thought the kid had it in him?, Simon thought. Maybe he's straightened out after all. Maybe there's more of a Gilbert in him than anyone could have thought.

Gary was still covertly in contact with Graine. And even more covertly, Gary was designing and creating a suit of mechanized armor.

Like Iron Man's? Well, yes and no. It was a lot less bulky, perhaps a bit less powerful, but it excelled in one area: armament. Gary's armor would be designed with fire and flame-throwing abilities as its forte. The burning of Watts, the cry, "Burn, baby, burn!", the incinerated draft cards, the firebombing of government buildings and banks...these were his inspirations. But there was more to it than that.

In his secret identity, Gary Gilbert would be able to do things that he wouldn't be able to without a mask. And wasn't that the reason why super-heroes put on a mask, in the first place? To conceal the surface, and to liberate the id-like thing of power within? To enable him to use the rhetoric he so admired in the Movement's leaders, and back them up with the power of technology and flame?

To be a firebrand?

To be the Firebrand.

That was why he did it.

One night, Gary Gilbert learned of a happening in a largely black neighborhood, the North Side of Bay City. The Iron Man Foundation was helping sponsor a community center, with a groundbreaking ceremony scheduled for a week hence. The black community was sharply divided on it. Some felt that the center would be all right. Others felt that the money spent on the center could be better put to the creation of jobs, and / or the training for them.

So some militants were talking about a strike. Gary Gilbert saw the name, "Iron Man", on the foundation's header, learned that the Mighty Shellhead himself was to put in an appearance, and went to Graine to talk things over.

"You think I ought to go?" Gary asked.

"I think your destiny just gave you a non-collect call," said Graine. "Go with it, baby. Committment."

Gary knew he was going, anyway. When he went in the hidden area of his shop, when he looked upon the gleaming surface of his armor, outfitted with flex-jointed metal, just like Iron Man's, and painted red and gold, just like Iron Man's, but with a clenched fist of flame for a chest emblem, there was only one thing he could do. One answer he could provide.

Over the weekend, he took the armor with him, and, when he got to Bay City, he put it on.

The inhabitants of the North Side were more than a bit nonplussed to see him jetting in on his flying boots (again, just like Iron Man's). Super-heroes weren't known for showing up in their neighborhood. Most of them seemed to think he was Iron Man himself. He disabused them of that notion, blasting a trash can near the community center site with a casual gesture of his metal glove. It burst into flames and burned or melted.

"I'm no Iron Man, baby," he said. "You can call me Firebrand. And I'm on your side."

"Oh? You are?" asked one man, getting in his face with a 'fro and a Dashiki and shades no human eye could peer through. "How do you even know what our side is?"

"Our side is whatever gets us what we want," replied Firebrand. "For you, it's keeping this blister of a center out of your community. Showing the Man what you want, and that you won't be trifled with. For me...it's the first blow I strike against the man." He held his hands below his face, palms up, fingers clawing, and let loose two long bursts of flame from them. Even the Dashikied guy had to draw back, in caution.

"What do we need from a honky like you?" asked another man. "I may not can see your face, but I know you when you talk."

"You need power, my man," said Firebrand, stepping forward to him. "The days of simple marches, protests, even throwing bottles and bricks are over. The day of super-heroes is upon us. The man with the Power. And I have power, baby, and I'm lending it to your side. Without me, you get a couple of days in the papers and TV, and that's it. With me, you're front-page news on every piece of media America's got. And that, baby, is the name of the game."

The brothers had to admit that, honky or not, he had a point.

So there was a conference. At the end of that conference, the gathering of militants, semi-militants, and people just out to catch the wave of the latest happening made a decision. "You help us occupy this site tomorrow, we'll see," said Mr. Dashiki. "We ain't out to fight, unless we're pushed. But if we're pushed...we'll see what you do."

Firebrand raised a fist. "They won't push you more than once."

As it turned out, Iron Man did show, in the company of his fellow Stark employee, an ex-boxer named Eddie March, who was black, and one Councilman Bradshaw, who was decidedly not. Bradshaw was all in favor of getting the protestors out with the blades of bulldozers, if that was what it took. Iron Man put a hand to his shoulder and said, "Starting a community center by dividing the community isn't what the Iron Man Foundation had in mind."

That was when Firebrand put in an appearance.

He blasted the ground near Iron Man with a fireball, just to show them where he was coming from. Then he vaulted off the top of a nearby building and made a perfect two-point landing on his jet boots. The cops, the militants, and Iron Man drew back in surprise for a moment, trying to figure out who this new arrival was and what side he was on.

Firebrand didn't give them much time to be in doubt.

"Are you so impressed by shiny armor and a boxing rep, you can't see the only reason this pair is rappin' us is to set you up as performing pigs? Well, I'm not! I see a tin hero who willingly lends his name and power to the very project you're trying to fight, and a man who looks like a brother, but comes on like an uncle...named Tom! I see the only thing they can say is going to come out Establishment. And the only was to answer that is with–this!" He held up an armored fist, full in their faces.

Iron Man knew that the firebursts he had seen came from the man's gloves. Therefore, to protect the crowd, he grabbed for Firebrand's gloves. Politically, it was a bad move: all some of the crowd could see was that he had attacked Firebrand. A few grabbed up rocks and started throwing them. They pinged off the Avenger's armor like sunflower seeds, but the gesture was important. At least to them. Iron Man was surprised, enough so that Firebrand could break free.

By that time, the wave had spread. A lot of uncommitteds took up bricks, bottles, sticks, anything they could, and started pelting them at Iron Man. Somebodies yelled, "Stop the fascist!" That did it. Iron Man didn't retaliate, but the congressman demanded that the cops attack, and they did. The billy clubs came out. The heads got busted.

Firebrand let off a burst of flame at his armored opponent. "Now see how hot things can really get, Iron Man!"

It was the beginning of Bay City's latest riot.

Shortly thereafter, Iron Man and Firebrand had jetted off to have their private war amidst the tenements. After their initial confrontation, the two had squared off in the ruins of a demolished building. Trying for an advantage, Iron Man grated, "Anxious to join whoever's paying you to turn Northside into a battleground, Firebrand?"

The radical superbeing sneered at him, deliberately. "You'd like to believe that, wouldn't you, Avenger? That I'm just part of a neat little criminal plot? Or maybe a Commie, a Pinko...that'd be easy to handle, too. Well, I'm just an all-American boy, Iron Man. One of those wide-eyed innocents who started out to make this nation a 'better place'. I sat in for civil rights, marched for peace, and demonstrated on campus...and got chased by vicious dogs, spat on by bigots, beat on by patriots, choked by tear gas, and blinded by mace, until I finally caught on...this country doesn't WANT to be changed! The only way to build anything decent is to tear down what's here and start over! Is that plot enough for you? I'm out to tear down the establishment any and every way I can!"

"Even by spilling the blood of the city's black community?" asked Iron Man.

"For their own good," retorted Firebrand. "The only way they'll ever be free is to fight. The end justifies the means."

The battle continued. It raged from the tenements to the office of Congressman Bradshaw himself, whom Firebrand took for a hostage. But in the process, Iron Man and Eddie March learned that Bradshaw owned a large part of the construction companies who were building the center, and that he was using his position to make himself rich. Bradshaw was exposed. In the final round of the battle, experience told. A pair of repulsor rays demolished Firebrand's hand-blasters, and pained him not a little bit.

Iron Man would have taken Firebrand, had he not been needed to intervene between police and protestors. Instead, the blazing battler had jetted off into the night, found his hiding place, removed his armor, stowed it in a suitcase, and went back to New Rochelle as plain Gary Gilbert.

He smiled at Simon. "I'm home," he said. Then both of them sat down to watch the evening news. There was a clip of Firebrand's battle with Iron Man featured.

That was a heady draft, and it was all he could do to hold in his pride while Dad was looking.

But in the weeks that followed, Gary had reason to reconsider. The news programs were filled with segments of super-hero versus super-villain battles. The Avengers fought the Masters of Evil. Spider-Man fought Dr. Octopus. The Fantastic Four opposed Dr. Doom. Somebody won. Somebody lost.

What did it accomplish?

Not one whole hell of a lot. It was all like an entertainment. Like wrestling. Or like war. But not an effective war. The city repaired itself after the ravages of every battle, and every month there was a new battle to be fought.

The Establishment remained unharmed by all the violence.

And if Gary Gilbert continued to be the Firebrand, he'd end up as just another one of Them.

Clearly, another path had to be sought. If one wanted to make war against society, against the government, against all the restrictive, restraining forces dividing man from man, and from his True Self, it had to be a covert war.

At least, until one had the power to make it overtly. But swiftly.

So Gary Gilbert had figuratively put the Firebrand suit in mothballs, and started to accumulate the power he would need for his new enterprise. He turned out to be quite the inventor. And since he wasn't an employee of Stark Enterprises, Stark could not claim his work. On the strength of several of these patents, Simon Gilbert was finally persuaded to jump ship from Stark and start his own firm.

Gilbert Enterprises was doing damned well. More, in fact, than even Simon could have understood.

Through Graine, who had become a power unto his own by this time, Gary kept covert contact with the underground. But there was another side that even Graine didn't know about, until, one night, Gary let him in on it.

"It'll take more than what we've been doing," he admitted. "Both sides have to be kept in the dark, until they know their part. The old bit about the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, definitely applies."

"And which hand am I, man?" asked Graine, who had gained a lot of weight to strain his blue T-shirt since Gary had known him.

"My good right one," said Gary. "You ought to know that."

"How about me? How much of the dark are you keeping me in?"

"Just as much as needs be, friend," said Gary, seriously. "Just as much as needs be."

"An army of super-villains," said Graine.

"Indeed," said Gary.

"A coordinated plan of terrorism," said Graine.

"You're catching on," said Gary.

"Resulting in what?" Graine fixed him with a gaze that Gilbert had long known. It meant: put all the cards on the table.

"The death of the Establishment," said Gary. "And the rise of an America nobody dared dream about. Not before now."

"I can dream a lot, GG."

"But I can dream, and make it work."

"So what do you want me to do?" asked Graine.

"I want you to say the word," said Gary. "Once you say it, you're in. And once you're in, you're either a winner with us, or dead. So consider it, brother. Consider it well."

Graine hesitated only a moment. "And the word is?"

Gary smiled without warmth. The look of it scared even Graine.

"The word," said Gary Gilbert, "is Fire."

To be continued...